Barney Blalock, Portland’s Lost Waterfront

What do you do with a drunken sailor?

Of course you’ve heard the stories of victims disappearing
in the night: drunken and drugged tourists shipped through Portland’s
vast network of turn-of-the-century Shanghai tunnels and sent as sailor
slaves on boats to China, never to be seen again. Families wept; children starved.

Well, bunkum. The
first recorded notion that Shanghaiing occurred in the tunnels was in
1972. And while I often favor interesting myth over dull reality, in
this case it’s the myth that lacks imagination.

The seamy riverfront
Portland of the late 1800s was a far more motley and interesting world
than those old tales suggest. A version of Shanghaiing did
exist—“crimping” is the word they used—but it didn’t happen in tunnels.
It happened right out in the open.

Local amateur
historian (and 33-year veteran of the Portland nautical grain trade)
Barney Blalock devotes about a third of his new book, Portland’s Lost Waterfront: Tall Ships, Steam Mills and Sailors’ Boardinghouses
(History Press, 192 pages, $19.99), to the whorehouses and sailors’
hotels of 19th-century Portland. In prose that sometimes seems heavily
affected by the old-time newspapers he’s citing, Blalock describes
boardinghouse gangsters like themighty Jim Turk and former boxer “Mysterious” Billy Smith.

Crimps, often with
the U.S. Marshals Service backing them, parted sailors from their money
with promises of beautiful women and better contracts on different
ships. The captains were held hostage to the boardinghouse masters;
sometimes sailors were stolen and then sold back to the very same ship
they’d left. In each case, a contract was signed, though often while
blackout drunk. Less commonly, vagrants—illegal under Portland law, and
so happily disposed of by local authorities—were shipped out.

One of the most
salient takeaways from the book is that Old Town—then called
Whitechapel—has resolutely maintained its character as a place of
vagrant drunkenness for over 100 years, even as it lately shifts to a
tequila-addled Gresham shore.

Blalock’s book covers
a broad swath of Portland history, but it’s obvious where his interests
lie. Beyond the boardinghouse and a conscientious telling of Astoria
and Portland’s early rivalry as port towns, the rest of the riverfront
history of bridges and ferries and the founding of Bull Run splinters
into ADHD piecemeal, making it difficult for the reader to fully
construct a coherent narrative.

But in its attention
to the early waterfront scow towns and wharf masters, Blalock’s book
remains a valuable and entertaining resource. Besides, it manages to
answer the age-old question of what you do with a drunken sailor: You
sell him to his own ship.

READ:Portland’s Lost Waterfront: Tall Ships, Steam Mills and Sailors’ Boardinghouses is available at bookstores.